The Oscars

OK… so the Oscars were last week. I didn’t watch them, I never do (I’ll get to that later), but I did manage to see the cool Horror Montage the morning after. Very cool.

A couple of days later, my buddy Cinesthete, at Reel Friction posted his thoughts on the Oscars. Upon reading it, I felt that I had express some of my own thoughts… mostly as rebuttal to his thoughts, and adding a few of my own.

I reproduced most of his article here, at least the parts that I had felt the need to comment. To read the whole article, go here. There were a few things that I had no thoughts or cares about.

Here goes:

I don’t pretend to understand cinematography (anyone who has seen my films can attest to that), but does lighting generated on a computer count? I’m surprised Avatar won.

I won’t even claim to understand any cinematography (at least you made a few films, Cinesthete), but as a 3D artist and animator, I can say that lighting is one of the most challenging aspects of the job. Every aspect of lighting is translated through hundreds of parameters that we take for granted. Positioning, intensity, and attenuation are just a difficult to determine in a virtual scene as it is in real life. And then there is the whole science of Radiosity (shadows and light bounces) that need to be configured… otherwise you’ll end up with something like a scene in the original Tron (they may have been ground breaking in 3D, but we have gone a long way since then).

Once you tweak all the parameters in order to imitate real life, you then have to marry it to actual real life footage. Granted, on many of todays sophisticated computers and equipment (thanks to George Lucas), this is not too difficult. But trust me, it takes damn near rocket science to figure out how to use all that equipment and programs.

So “lighting generated on a computer” is really putting it lightly. It’s like saying anyone can pickup a camera and become a James Cameron. It is, after all, just “looking through a lens”, right? I’m not shocked that Avatar won that award. As a matter of fact, I am shocked it didn’t received more technical awards, but thats how the Oscars work…
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Facticious Science: Good Science or Bad Science?

The main focus of the blog is to examine the factious science found in story based media. Whether it’s in a movie, literature, or even video games, I consider the setting, and it’s science, equally as important as the structure of it’s wrapping story.

Discover Magazine online recently released a great article (coinciding with its Extreme Universe issue) that points out just that… the science in fiction. This particular article was written by a lad who likes to call himself the “Bad Astronomer.” I’ve been following this fellow for years (before joining Discover) and his writings were awesome. He basically scanned the internet and found articles where science was abused: written to appear like real science, but really just a bunch of cow fodder. So I though it was pretty fitting that he pointed out some inconsistencies in movies that just defy science.

You see, sometimes it may not be real or even possible, but it can be believable. Science Fiction movies of the old days are funny now simply because we know better… our real science has advanced so much, that we find the old ideas comical. You can’t get away with that some much these days… How many times have you watched something that had some kind of scientific thing that was so blatantly not possible that it just ruins the story? Many movies fail because of this. However, many movies can get away with it because it crosses over the science barrier and into the magic. But even magic has it’s weaknesses. One has to be very careful with the details: once there is an inconsistency in those details, the story will be destined to fail just as badly.

This little interactive on the Discover website is pretty cool with some very interesting, valid, points. It’s nice to know that there are others out there that think like I do. Check it out!